Severe skeptic, coming through!

[darkerside]

jaci said:

*laughs at the random quote* I guess I should've picked you for a monty python fan. Anyway back to the topic.

Darkeside if you don't want to read, maybe try watching the elegant universe (I'm serious its an interesting show). It's avaliable free on line. It's not on parapsychology but it gives you an idea of just how odd the universe probably is compared to most people's perceptions. You keep making a lot of generalisations that are not necisarily fact and at regular intervals revert to calling us potential "loonies" without doing your research first.

Nothing is proven beyond doubt in this area, but there is not a total lack of supporting evidence for it either which most "skeptics" seem to assume. I don't mind people comming in here questioning this stuff. A bit of skepticism can be a healthy thing, but throwing insults around is not and it gets old really quickly.

Please point out where I have insulted any one of you. My comments about people being crazy were directed at the people from PsiPog who play John Edwards to find wallets, people like the telephone psychics who just manipulate people to make a quick buck, and myself. When I said I felt a little crazy doing this stuff, that was not a reflection on you guys. I've been fairly closed to the paranormal all my life, so for me to try it, it did seem crazy. I wondered if everyone else was too at a few points, but I didn't actually say it for sure. Everyone here seems completely sane, but I'd have to say there's far more loonies out there. Just click any spam email relating to psychics to find them.

I did not say there was no supporting evidence, I simply said there was not enough to justify calling it fact, which is necessary to make it a science. You say I'm the one making bad generalizations about psychics, yet you're generalizing skeptics as being closed-minded people who won't look for evidence that contradicts their beliefs. I've read about the Ganzfield studies, and they seem to show something, but it's just not enough for mainstream science to accept it.

[innerfire]

You have to study the history of mainstream science, they don't like to accept groundbreaking things very easily, a couple things I know off the top of my head:

1) There are still people that don't accept that the Earth is a sphere, our wonderful friends in the Flat Earth Society.

2) It wasn't just some irrational opposition from the church that faced Copericus's theory of a helio-centric model, actual scientists were quite sure that his theory was wrong. Tycho Brahe, a Danish astronomer, was so convinced that Copericus's theory didn't hold (which in fact it was slightly inaccurate), that he took an extensive amount of observations of the night sky in an attempt to disprove Copericus, which were ironically used by Kepler later to prove that the planets did in fact orbit around the sun.

3) Galileo vs the Church, didn't work out well.

Basically mainstream science doesn't accept something that conflicts with already existing definitions of the universe unless you can explicitly and extensively say that the current stuff is wrong, and even then that's not always enough in the case of point 3.

[jaci]

You say I'm the one making bad generalizations about psychics, yet you're generalizing skeptics as being closed-minded people who won't look for evidence that contradicts their beliefs

“Oh well, what can you expect being a skeptic at a board of believers

Maybe I didn’t have the best wording there, easy to misinterperate. I did say most “skeptics” note the inverted commas. That’s because I was referring to the the majority of people I’ve come across both on sites like this and sites set up to support them. They refer to themselves as being skeptics while being nothing of the sort. A skeptic analyses information to make a decision. A “skeptic” the way I’m referring to it, already holds a set view and is determined to debunk any information that may not support it. I have nothing against true skeptics, as I said a bit of scepticism is a good thing. You do need it in this area, this is a lot of mis-information around on BOTH sides I wasn’t necisarily including you in the “skeptic” category, it was more your comment of being the “equivalent for the other team” along with the references to nuts and loonies that set that rant.

Where have you name called? Ok maybe you didn’t specify us as in “the people at psionline” but you did make some sweeping statements like:

“Sorry if I came across as "gotta debunk the loonies", but there's so many of them in this field that I can't help wonder if it's just them, or if EVERYONE's lost a few marbles.”

“It boggles my mind how these people try to send thoughts across distances upwards of 1000 miles to strange people they've never actually been in proximity with. As with my last question about the nuts who claim to be able to find people's wallets over the internet, I'm thinking that it might all be in their heads.” (As in if you think you can send something over distance you get to be placed in the “nuts” category).

“It's as if these places derive their ideals from the famous movies, like Star Wars” (As in we are unable to tell what reality is? Or are just so caught up in role playing that we extend it to our communities?)

Feel free to think “I wonder if these people are all completely nuts” but you don’t need to keep saying it in my opinion. Sorry if I sounded a bit harsh in the last post, I don’t want to start a flame war. If no offence was intended, there’s none taken. I'll drop the subject. And I really did mean it about watching the Elegant universe, it’s an interesting show, worthwhile watching.

[neveza]

Darkerside, I'm from psipog, I take what you said as a great insult about their credability. Sure, I understand that area of the "I lost (item)" threads are filled with beginners while getting beginners to help of where it is, but those that are skilled could give a decent explaination of where it is whether it is by words or picture. All because it's like John Edwards, doesn't mean it's not real. You should really not speak bad about anything that you do not understand or have any true evidence that what's going on is false.

www.upconline.net/viewtopic.php?id=953 - If you want something with theroetical science, here's a thread about ErikJDurwoodII's Hypthosis about what we call psi. He's planning to do some more research on his ideas soon with a Infrared camera and (if he can get the money) a UV camera and he's creating a "flare chamber" as he called it.

[The Devil's Advocate]

I may not be a PhD research scientist but I AM a scientist.

I'm not fond of everything Psipog put out, including the 'find the lost wallet' style threads, but that doesn’t negate the good and accurate things there. I'm not fond of Newton's assumptions that light had to propagate itself through some form of substance, at the time called the 'Ether'. This theory was later ‘proved wrong’ (By Einstein) and replaced by what we term ‘space’ (details on how the two are different are not appropriate here), but does not negate the other work Newton did with wave theory and motion (I don’t like the fact he invented calculus but that’s an entirely different argument). Copernicus’s math put the planets in perfectly circular orbits. He was wrong, but he’d still managed convincing evidence that the universe didn’t orbit the EARTH. The man who often gets ‘blamed’ for the creationist time line was wrong, but he came to an older age than anyone had ever expected, and used the best data he had available to him at the time. Around the time of the discovery of radiation they thought, based on thermodynamic data, that the earth was only 12 million years old. This did not invalidate the thermodynamic methods, just they didn’t know enough. Then we understood radiation and that upped the age to Billions not millions of years.

Science doesn’t require something to be FACT to study it. Science doesn’t study the fact that water is wet, they study WHY it is wet. When would water NOT be wet? They study what makes it flow. Why does it expand when it freezes? Even on such a simple thing the QUESTIONS go on and on. Science is about questions. It is about finding the answers. It’s about what’s going on in the world. If science required something to be a proven fact before it was studied, why would we study it? How would it BECOME proven if someone didn’t go ‘hey look at that! I wonder if…’ The point of science is to learn. This universe is one big puzzle with trillions of pieces, and slowly bit by bit we figure out the rules of the puzzle and the shapes of the pieces and where they all fit, and sometimes we find we’ve got pieces in the entirely wrong area. And sometimes we find that piece we thought didn’t even look like it belonged in the puzzle fits amazingly well in this one area, but we just couldn’t see it until we’d built more.

You have presented us NO evidence, no contradiction that can adequately explain everything we have observed. OBSERVED not imagined, not made up. If you want to function as a skeptic rather than a heckler you can’t just go ‘well you’re all nuts’ if you’re going to do that you honestly might as well not be here because you’re not going to do us any good and we’re not going to do you any good if you’re not willing to approach it from the scientific manner you claim we’re ignoring. Ask your questions. Compare our observations with your own. Keep in mind we are doing research to what to US is an existent phenomenon. Does it work exactly the way we say? In all honesty probably not. WE don’t know enough! Just like the age of the earth has been revised repeatedly over the last 600 years, what we learn and know about Psi will be revised the more we learn. But if we go from the perspective of ‘Psi isn’t a fact so we can’t study it’ we’ll NEVER know because we’ll never take the steps needed to find out!

Frankly I’d rather this were all a game I could quit playing and walk away from. I do not have that luxury. I simply do not. I would not want to be alive when psi became ‘fact’, especially if it did so abruptly. I don’t want to be caught up in the riots, paranoia, and panic that would ensue. Even now without slow intermediary steps massive advances are not readily accepted. So please leave your opinions of insanity at the door. We want you here, another perspective is a wonderful thing, but repetitions that boil down to 'you're all nuts because I don't get it' are not useful in any way shape or form.

~The Devil's Advocate

[darkerside]

devilsadvocate said:

You have presented us NO evidence, no contradiction that can adequately explain everything we have observed. OBSERVED not imagined, not made up. If you want to function as a skeptic rather than a heckler you can’t just go ‘well you’re all nuts’ if you’re going to do that you honestly might as well not be here because you’re not going to do us any good and we’re not going to do you any good if you’re not willing to approach it from the scientific manner you claim we’re ignoring. Ask your questions. Compare our observations with your own. Keep in mind we are doing research to what to US is an existent phenomenon. Does it work exactly the way we say? In all honesty probably not. WE don’t know enough! Just like the age of the earth has been revised repeatedly over the last 600 years, what we learn and know about Psi will be revised the more we learn. But if we go from the perspective of ‘Psi isn’t a fact so we can’t study it’ we’ll NEVER know because we’ll never take the steps needed to find out!

You're right; I can't contradict your observations. There would be no way to disprove psionics until science gains a perfect understanding of the human brain, which may never happen. And since you can't really make a claim against it, all a skeptic can do is contradict the claims for it, which is very hard to do considering that so much of psionics takes place on a non-physical level. The problem is, there's been so many hoaxes that it's hard to believe anything related to psi is real. Project Alpha threw all the previous psi-related studies into question, and lots of people believe that every extraordinary result of a paranormal study was the result of fraud or improper testing procedures.

"It's not science, so it shouldn't be studied" wasn't my angle at all. When I said it's not "science", I was going from the perspective of mainstream science, which seems to have an innate bias for existing theories over new theories. I guess protoscience is a better description, since it's just being developed but isn't there yet.

I guess should keep my thoughts to myself about wondering who's crazy and who isn't, at risk of being labeled a heckler. The one group I won't let up on, however, is the cold readers. Don't get me wrong about PsiPog; the rest of the site is great, but that one board where people find stuff is pretty bad. It's scientific fact that cold reading requires no paranormal skills, and the overwhelming number of wrong answers on that forum, along with people attributing even the slightest correllation between the psychic's answer and the object's position to psionics seems to point directly at cold reading. Sure, there may be a few genuine people finding things, but most of the topics reek of cold reading.

devilsadvocate said:

Frankly I’d rather this were all a game I could quit playing and walk away from.

Trade you abilities.

I could really use to read everyone's minds and emotions, and you could walk away from it all.

[anonymousdark]

I don't know...it sounds once you become sensitive to emotions and thoughts, you can't simply ignore it. Empahty sounds cool, but what if you're in a hospital and aren't shielded? That would really suck, I imagine...all that sadness and death would drive me crazy. But, I guess that's what shields are for. Anyways, I'm new to this, so I probably don't know what I'm talking about...

-Anonymous

[The Devil's Advocate]

“You're right; I can't contradict your observations. “

Make your own. Actually do some research. Then you will have observations of your own that may disagree with ours.

“There would be no way to disprove psionics until science gains a perfect understanding of the human brain, which may never happen. “

What’s this insistence on PERFECTION that you seem to be obsessed with. Do you think we actually have a perfect understanding of ANYTHING at all? For crying out loud mere WATER keeps surprising us! The “Law of Gravity” has been revised so many times its not even funny. You should have had this in high school science. Einstien’s theories expanded on, and to a degree invalidated Newton’s. Newton’s theories expanded on and to a degree invalidated the theories that came before. THIS is science. Science is a PROCESS. It’s not an end result.

“And since you can't really make a claim against it, all a skeptic can do is contradict the claims for it, which is very hard to do considering that so much of psionics takes place on a non-physical level.”

Make your own observations. Do statistical analysis. For precog I’m working on the ASP code that will be open to the public for a random number generator. You’ll be welcome to look at it. You can take what ‘should’ happen. And as the experiment progresses you should be able to notice trends. If ‘normal’ should be 50% of the time by guessing as in with a coin flip, and you have someone who routinely has an accuracy of 75% there’s something worth looking into there. THIS IS SCIENCE. And it doesn’t require you to be precognitive yourself. It just requires you to look at the data with impartiality.

“ The problem is, there's been so many hoaxes that it's hard to believe anything related to psi is real.”

No, your problem is you don’t want to sit down and do the work to actually UNDERSTAND what we are doing and use logic and what we /do/ know to contradict. I’ve done it repeatedly. I poke holes in flawed theories regularly. It’s actually not that hard if you bother to think. It’s not hard to figure out where the hoaxes are in most cases, not if you actually know what you’re talking about.

“Project Alpha threw all the previous psi-related studies into question, and lots of people believe that every extraordinary result of a paranormal study was the result of fraud or improper testing procedures.”

Have you actually bothered to read the reports about that? Have you actually picked up the journal of parapsychology and READ it. I’m looking for the article. But this was covered. The scientific procedure wasn’t as bad as everyone makes out. The researchers were not stage magicians they didn’t know how such things could be faked, but when they did, they started looking for these methods. They repeated the experiments and the fakes were not able to fool the researchers twice. Listen to the whole story before you start condemning people. They screwed up. They realized they screwed up they fixed the mistake. That happens. Or are you trying to claim that scientists are perfect? That would disqualify every person on the planet.

"It's not science, so it shouldn't be studied" wasn't my angle at all. When I said it's not "science", I was going from the perspective of mainstream science, which seems to have an innate bias for existing theories over new theories. I guess protoscience is a better description, since it's just being developed but isn't there yet.”

No, it IS science. There is no protoscience. It’s science. The study of psionics is studying the way our world works. Just like Physics, chemistry, geology, and on and on and on. They all study how the world works. STUDY not define. The world doesn’t require us to define it before it works. It works we figure out how. It doesn’t care if we say whatever’s going on is impossible. Science, as I’ve said again and again, is the STUDY of the world around us. It is the PROCESS of answering questions. Don’t realize that one of the requirements for a scientific theory is it MUST be capable of being invalidated. Newton’s Laws of gravitation have fallen. Einstein proved them to be inaccurate. Yet, they function on Earth. Einstien simply came up with a more complete description and revealed Newton’s understanding and descriptions to be a special case that applies to Earth, a small piece of the actual truth. Yet they described what Newton could observe at the time. Does that mean he wasn’t a physicist? Because he didn’t have Einstein’s information? No. He gave us many valuable things and without Newton’s steps, Einstein’s probably would not have been possible.

“I guess should keep my thoughts to myself about wondering who's crazy and who isn't, at risk of being labeled a heckler.”

You came to us knowing what we believe and what we were doing. It’s all right there on the main site. It’s in every post. If you came here to be a skeptic to us as a group please stop citing everyone BUT us as evidence that we ‘have to be crazy’. You are not making any kind of convincing case that what /we/ are doing is crazy or fraudulent, just that others in the past can, have, or might have been. Should you believe in psionics? Maybe. That’s up to you. But at least learn what our arguments are. Learn how the ‘physics of psi’ seems to work, ask questions, pose alternative methods. Ask WHY we think it is one not the other. Get our lines of evidence, internal and external. THAT is the difference between a skeptic and a heckler. You’re spending a lot of energy saying you can’t do what you came here to do. It’s not impossible, it just requires more work on your part than you have thus far put forth.

“ The one group I won't let up on, however, is the cold readers. Don't get me wrong about PsiPog; the rest of the site is great, but that one board where people find stuff is pretty bad. It's scientific fact that cold reading requires no paranormal skills, and the overwhelming number of wrong answers on that forum, along with people attributing even the slightest correllation between the psychic's answer and the object's position to psionics seems to point directly at cold reading. Sure, there may be a few genuine people finding things, but most of the topics reek of cold reading.”

Acting my name in a similar vein to the standard you are setting for yourself: Can you PROVE it’s cold reading? They’re not my favorite threads but you seem so very certain that pretty much everyone there is a phony, yet you have little evidence outside of your own impressions, which means it could be all in your head. And by the way what you’re doing is accusing them of fraud. Serious accusation there. You can’t prove, by your standards, that they’re NOT using remote viewing. You’re treading on dangerous ground here. How would you tell if they were using RVing? What can you compare what is being said to? What do YOU know about cold reading techniques? How do you know it’s not just humans making mistakes and jumping to conclusions? What gives YOU the right to jump to the conclusion that it must be fraudulent?

I don’t like ‘find this for me’ threads, largely because it’s much too easy to give the hecklers more ammunition. It’s not what we’re here for. In case you hadn’t noticed we have squashed pretty much every thread of that vein on this site. You sound absolutely certain you’re right, and then gripe that we won’t come around to /your/ way of thinking. Live up to the standard you are setting for us. Meet us in the middle. If you’re going to accuse US of these practices, please cite some evidence from /us/ that leads you these conclusions. You do YOUR homework, call us when we don’t do ours. Actually do us the courtesy of learning our perspective. I for one know quite a bit about a skeptic’s.

We are not Psipog. We are not UPC. We are NOT Mrs. Cleo’s dollar a minute psychic hotline. Do us the courtesy of holding us accountable for OUR actions not every one else’s. I for one am not, nor ever have been a member of Psipog, I have used some of their articles and disagreed with others. I am not accountable for one bad set of threads on a forum of which I have never been a member much less a moderator! If you are going to use us as a measure of a serious psionic community stop trying to turn us into everyone ELSE or equate what we do to them when there is no direct correlation outside of the fact we both deal with psionics. That’s like saying Newton WAS Einstein or Einstein was Newton.

“Trade you abilities.

I could really use to read everyone's minds and emotions, and you could walk away from it all.”

You don’t want what I have, kiddo. You really don’t. I’ve had almost 2 decades of learning how to deal with it. If you got what I have, at my strength, it would probably fry your brain completely. You just do not have the experience or skill to deal with it.

Note to AnonymousDark: Good points. You seem to understand very well what the problems of Empathy are. I’ve had scenarios like the one you describe. I’m glad one new person can come to that realization independently.

~The Devil’s Advocate

[darkerside]

"What’s this insistence on PERFECTION that you seem to be obsessed with. Do you think we actually have a perfect understanding of ANYTHING at all? For crying out loud mere WATER keeps surprising us! The “Law of Gravity” has been revised so many times its not even funny. You should have had this in high school science. Einstien’s theories expanded on, and to a degree invalidated Newton’s. Newton’s theories expanded on and to a degree invalidated the theories that came before. THIS is science. Science is a PROCESS. It’s not an end result."

Did you not read the "which may never happen" part? What you just described WHY we may never come to a perfect understanding of it.

"Make your own observations. Do statistical analysis. For precog I’m working on the ASP code that will be open to the public for a random number generator. You’ll be welcome to look at it. You can take what ‘should’ happen. And as the experiment progresses you should be able to notice trends. If ‘normal’ should be 50% of the time by guessing as in with a coin flip, and you have someone who routinely has an accuracy of 75% there’s something worth looking into there. THIS IS SCIENCE. And it doesn’t require you to be precognitive yourself. It just requires you to look at the data with impartiality."

But the problem is, you can't disprove anything that way. If the result is very close to that 50%, all you can say was that psionics was most likely not involved. If it deviates enough, you can say it probably was. What you can't say is that psionics probably doesn't exist. The breakdown is:

No deviation: Psionics was probably not involved. Its existence is still questionable.
Deviation: Psionics was probably involved. For something to be involved, it must exist, so this also implies that psionics probably exists.

"No, your problem is you don’t want to sit down and do the work to actually UNDERSTAND what we are doing and use logic and what we /do/ know to contradict. I’ve done it repeatedly. I poke holes in flawed theories regularly. It’s actually not that hard if you bother to think. It’s not hard to figure out where the hoaxes are in most cases, not if you actually know what you’re talking about."

I was just considering chance. When you see something go badly so many times (the psi hoaxes), the chances don't seem good of it ever going right. But so far, your community has turned out a whole lot more legitimate than a lot of other places I've seen, so I'll "take another chance", if you will.

"Have you actually bothered to read the reports about that? Have you actually picked up the journal of parapsychology and READ it. I’m looking for the article. But this was covered. The scientific procedure wasn’t as bad as everyone makes out. The researchers were not stage magicians they didn’t know how such things could be faked, but when they did, they started looking for these methods. They repeated the experiments and the fakes were not able to fool the researchers twice. Listen to the whole story before you start condemning people. They screwed up. They realized they screwed up they fixed the mistake. That happens. Or are you trying to claim that scientists are perfect? That would disqualify every person on the planet."

I got my information from the Wikipedia. The researchers were pretty bad at detecting fraud. Sure, they got better, but you wonder how much fraud people got away in other studies given the outcome of this one. Or it could have just been coincidence that Project Alpha targeted a bad group of researchers. But many people won't consider that, and instead believe that everyone was getting defrauded. I should know; I was one of those people.

"No, it IS science. There is no protoscience. It’s science. The study of psionics is studying the way our world works. Just like Physics, chemistry, geology, and on and on and on. They all study how the world works. STUDY not define. The world doesn’t require us to define it before it works. It works we figure out how. It doesn’t care if we say whatever’s going on is impossible. Science, as I’ve said again and again, is the STUDY of the world around us. It is the PROCESS of answering questions. Don’t realize that one of the requirements for a scientific theory is it MUST be capable of being invalidated. Newton’s Laws of gravitation have fallen. Einstein proved them to be inaccurate. Yet, they function on Earth. Einstien simply came up with a more complete description and revealed Newton’s understanding and descriptions to be a special case that applies to Earth, a small piece of the actual truth. Yet they described what Newton could observe at the time. Does that mean he wasn’t a physicist? Because he didn’t have Einstein’s information? No. He gave us many valuable things and without Newton’s steps, Einstein’s probably would not have been possible."

Meh. Arguing semantics. Protoscience is just science that hasn't been accepted by the mainstream community, which was where I was coming from.

"You came to us knowing what we believe and what we were doing. It’s all right there on the main site. It’s in every post. If you came here to be a skeptic to us as a group please stop citing everyone BUT us as evidence that we ‘have to be crazy’. You are not making any kind of convincing case that what /we/ are doing is crazy or fraudulent, just that others in the past can, have, or might have been. Should you believe in psionics? Maybe. That’s up to you. But at least learn what our arguments are. Learn how the ‘physics of psi’ seems to work, ask questions, pose alternative methods. Ask WHY we think it is one not the other. Get our lines of evidence, internal and external. THAT is the difference between a skeptic and a heckler. You’re spending a lot of energy saying you can’t do what you came here to do. It’s not impossible, it just requires more work on your part than you have thus far put forth."

What part of "I wondered if" don't you understand? I WONDERED if everyone was crazy. A passing thought. Not a case by any means. I got rid of that thought once I saw some better evidence here for psionics.

"Acting my name in a similar vein to the standard you are setting for yourself: Can you PROVE it’s cold reading? They’re not my favorite threads but you seem so very certain that pretty much everyone there is a phony, yet you have little evidence outside of your own impressions, which means it could be all in your head. And by the way what you’re doing is accusing them of fraud. Serious accusation there. You can’t prove, by your standards, that they’re NOT using remote viewing. You’re treading on dangerous ground here. How would you tell if they were using RVing? What can you compare what is being said to? What do YOU know about cold reading techniques? How do you know it’s not just humans making mistakes and jumping to conclusions? What gives YOU the right to jump to the conclusion that it must be fraudulent?"

If perfect proof is what you're asking, then no, I can't give it to you. No proof is perfect, but I've read a lot about cold reading, and I do believe I have enough evidence that much of the RV board was cold reading to convince most people.

"I don’t like ‘find this for me’ threads, largely because it’s much too easy to give the hecklers more ammunition. It’s not what we’re here for. In case you hadn’t noticed we have squashed pretty much every thread of that vein on this site. You sound absolutely certain you’re right, and then gripe that we won’t come around to /your/ way of thinking. Live up to the standard you are setting for us. Meet us in the middle. If you’re going to accuse US of these practices, please cite some evidence from /us/ that leads you these conclusions. You do YOUR homework, call us when we don’t do ours. Actually do us the courtesy of learning our perspective. I for one know quite a bit about a skeptic’s."

I did not accuse YOU guys of the cold reading, I accused a SUBSET of people from Psipog with evidence gathered from PsiPog. My correllation of this to your practices was only in thought, a fallacious thought which I have since rescinded.

"We are not Psipog. We are not UPC. We are NOT Mrs. Cleo’s dollar a minute psychic hotline. Do us the courtesy of holding us accountable for OUR actions not every one else’s. I for one am not, nor ever have been a member of Psipog, I have used some of their articles and disagreed with others. I am not accountable for one bad set of threads on a forum of which I have never been a member much less a moderator! If you are going to use us as a measure of a serious psionic community stop trying to turn us into everyone ELSE or equate what we do to them when there is no direct correlation outside of the fact we both deal with psionics. That’s like saying Newton WAS Einstein or Einstein was Newton."

It looks like you've made your whole case on the basis that I corrollate the practices of other people with yours. This isn't true, at least not any more. But that doesn't mean I don't have reason to believe your practices might be invalid either. A while ago, I debunked your precognition experiment, which had several people here believing that they were, indeed, using psychic powers to return extraordinary results, when it was all built into the program to return high chance results. I'm afraid you haven't confronted this piece of evidence yet. It doesn't go to disprove psionics as a whole (as I mentioned above), but it does show that your practices may be flawed.

[The Devil's Advocate]

“Did you not read the "which may never happen" part? What you just described WHY we may never come to a perfect understanding of it.”

YES, I read it, but all but stated that if we didn’t know everything there was to know about the brain we could never do anything with psi because it wasn’t absolutely proven.

”But the problem is, you can't disprove anything that way. If the result is very close to that 50%, all you can say was that psionics was most likely not involved. If it deviates enough, you can say it probably was. What you can't say is that psionics probably doesn't exist. The breakdown is:

No deviation: Psionics was probably not involved. Its existence is still questionable.
Deviation: Psionics was probably involved. For something to be involved, it must exist, so this also implies that psionics probably exists.”

You just contradicted yourself. That’s as close to proof as Science ever gets: This line of evidence implies this… this line of evidence implies that… we have more lines of evidence that point to A than B therefore A is probably correct.

”I was just considering chance. When you see something go badly so many times (the psi hoaxes), the chances don't seem good of it ever going right. But so far, your community has turned out a whole lot more legitimate than a lot of other places I've seen, so I'll "take another chance", if you will.”

You didn’t say one thing about ‘chance’. You said because there are so many hoaxes out there, we are probably a hoax. And you cited absolutely NOTHING we have done anywhere to associate us with the hoaxes you were speaking of. How very generous of you to concede we might be legitimate after spending several posts comparing us to hoaxes and frauds without once citing anything we’ve done. How very scientific. (Please not dripping sarcasm)

”I got my information from the Wikipedia. The researchers were pretty bad at detecting fraud. Sure, they got better, but you wonder how much fraud people got away in other studies given the outcome of this one. Or it could have just been coincidence that Project Alpha targeted a bad group of researchers. But many people won't consider that, and instead believe that everyone was getting defrauded. I should know; I was one of those people.”

1) Don’t trust everything that Wikipedia tells you ANYONE can upload it. I read that article myself. It got the main right, but had several strong biases especially against the researchers. Wikipedia is a good jump off point, but there are as many morons posting to it as legitimate scientists.
2) I’m currently sorting through the 30 or so articles from the parapsychology journal that I have. One of them has several paragraphs dedicated to that. It’s a good alternate perspective, and directly addresses the procedures which were NOT as bad as the wikipedia article implies. I will post the issue number and article title when I locate the article.
3) If you’re not willing to consider all sides of it please go join the masses who will never believe in psi even if it IS categorically scientifically proven, which, given that our understanding of GRAVITY isn’t categorically proven isn’t likely.
4) Scientists make mistakes. If you ruled out every screw up in all of science we wouldn’t have a huge number of advances that we do, including penicillin. They CORRECTED the issues with procedures. That’s what you do when you find a mistake you don’t sit there going ‘well that invalidates everything we just did’ you go back. You fix the problem and re-do the experiment to see how it impacted your results. Where is this bad science? This is what you do when you discover another element that had been previously unknown.

”Meh. Arguing semantics. Protoscience is just science that hasn't been accepted by the mainstream community, which was where I was coming from.”

Then SAY that. What you actually said, reguardless of what you meant, what you actually SAID was until psionics was complete categorically proven it would never be science. You also implied all the main stream sciences WERE utterly prove, when they’re not. They’re just categorized areas of study. You’ve been arguing semantics and making sweeping generalizations since you came here. Don’t try and gripe at me when I call you on it.

”What part of "I wondered if" don't you understand? I WONDERED if everyone was crazy. A passing thought. Not a case by any means. I got rid of that thought once I saw some better evidence here for psionics.”

Yet, you never MENTION that. You just go on about how crazy it all sounds and how impossible it all seems. You don’t give any lines of evidence other than ‘that sounds absurd.’ When you repeat in every other post that ‘passing thought’ that we’re crazy what do you expect us to believe? When most of your posts either deliberately or accidentally call us frauds, hoaxes, and phonies why are you surprised when we’re trying to correct you?

”If perfect proof is what you're asking, then no, I can't give it to you. No proof is perfect, but I've read a lot about cold reading, and I do believe I have enough evidence that much of the RV board was cold reading to convince most people.”

Then give it. Live up to what you’re demanding of us, and you have several times stated you want perfect proof of psionics. If you can’t give us perfect proof of your observations then do not even imply you want perfect proof of psionics. Hold yourself to the same standard you hold us to, or don’t bother.

”I did not accuse YOU guys of the cold reading, I accused a SUBSET of people from Psipog with evidence gathered from PsiPog. My correllation of this to your practices was only in thought, a fallacious thought which I have since rescinded.”

Where did you rescind it? You just kept on comparing us to everyone else under the sun without once mentioning anything WE had done here, on this site, in our articles. You just keep babbling on about everyone BUT us, and very heavily implying that this was how you viewed ANYONE who practiced psionics. You keep bringing up everything everyone else is doing wrong and applying it to us. You don’t bot

”It looks like you've made your whole case on the basis that I corrollate the practices of other people with yours. This isn't true, at least not any more. But that doesn't mean I don't have reason to believe your practices might be invalid either. A while ago, I debunked your precognition experiment, which had several people here believing that they were, indeed, using psychic powers to return extraordinary results, when it was all built into the program to return high chance results. I'm afraid you haven't confronted this piece of evidence yet. It doesn't go to disprove psionics as a whole (as I mentioned above), but it does show that your practices may be flawed.”

No, that was only a small part of my case. Your apparent faulty understanding of what science actually is and how it actually works was a major topic throughout. Your insistence on arguments that are not evidence was another. And then I concluded with your refusal to discuss THIS site and it’s own merits rather than superimposing everyone else’s mistakes on us. Half the things you said you were saying here, never once were actually said, and usually you were implying the exact opposite of what you now claim was your intent.

And yes, I have. As I’ve mentioned repeatedly I’m re-designing the experiment. When I get the code up you’re welcome to take a look at it. MY belief is based on things external to that particular faulty piece of equipment. I still haven’t gotten the Java code on the hexatron to actually decompile as anything other than gibberish. Reading code through wingding is not exactly an easy task. See my point on what you do when you find out something may be a problem. My previous experiment in the field was with a regular playing deck of cards. There my accuracy was about 65-70% on guessing color. The posted results were lost with the intermediate site for psionline and I’ve not located the note book I kept the original data in. Though I did freak out the class I was in at the time.

The Hexatron was simply a convenient tool. It turned out to be too suspect to use, so we’re re-doing the experiment. This is what happens in ANY science when you find out you have contaminated results. You do the experiment again. You haven’t addressed anything else on site. You just gloat over the one thing and seem to think that kills EVERYTHING. You have obviously never actually done research. You’ve never tried to account for all the variables yourself. You’ve never had to deal with the situation where someone else used the lab and jostled your equipment so now all your readings are 30 microns off which completely changes how the data are going to correlate. If you’re basing everything on that one case, you really need to review your scientific method, and take a good hard look at why you’re actually here. Are you here to go, as you did on that post, “HA! I win!” or are you here to actually learn something?

If the later, please and kindly actually start looking at EVERYTHING we do. Not just the ones you think will get you an ‘easy win’. I don’t feel like playing that kind of a game. It’s getting very old.

If we are going to be taking this discussion any further, the mods would probably appreciate us moving it to the Debate and Discussion forum. It has gotten beyond the scope of newbies.

~The Devil’s Advocate

[darkerside]

(Are the mods even around any more?)

"YES, I read it, but all but stated that if we didn’t know everything there was to know about the brain we could never do anything with psi because it wasn’t absolutely proven."

HOW on earth could you make that inference!? It stated that it could never be DISproven, not we couldn't do anything until it was absolutely proven! I don't know why you think I think that proof is necessary to study psi(I mean, I've been practicing, and I don't have proof), but you're severely misrepresenting my position, and I'm getting just a tad sick of it.

"You just contradicted yourself. That’s as close to proof as Science ever gets: This line of evidence implies this… this line of evidence implies that… we have more lines of evidence that point to A than B therefore A is probably correct."

That's not a contradiction. What that says is that, with those observations, you can form proof of one side but not the other. Unless you thought I was referring to PERFECT proof, in which case I'd say you're the one with the obsession on perfection.

"You didn’t say one thing about ‘chance’. You said because there are so many hoaxes out there, we are probably a hoax. And you cited absolutely NOTHING we have done anywhere to associate us with the hoaxes you were speaking of. How very generous of you to concede we might be legitimate after spending several posts comparing us to hoaxes and frauds without once citing anything we’ve done. How very scientific. (Please not dripping sarcasm)"

Yes, I see you're the epitome of science and logic by making your case with an ad naseum argument against my previous posts. Saying my correllations were faulty five times doesn't make it more right.

"1) Don’t trust everything that Wikipedia tells you ANYONE can upload it. I read that article myself. It got the main right, but had several strong biases especially against the researchers. Wikipedia is a good jump off point, but there are as many morons posting to it as legitimate scientists.
2) I’m currently sorting through the 30 or so articles from the parapsychology journal that I have. One of them has several paragraphs dedicated to that. It’s a good alternate perspective, and directly addresses the procedures which were NOT as bad as the wikipedia article implies. I will post the issue number and article title when I locate the article.
3) If you’re not willing to consider all sides of it please go join the masses who will never believe in psi even if it IS categorically scientifically proven, which, given that our understanding of GRAVITY isn’t categorically proven isn’t likely.
4) Scientists make mistakes. If you ruled out every screw up in all of science we wouldn’t have a huge number of advances that we do, including penicillin. They CORRECTED the issues with procedures. That’s what you do when you find a mistake you don’t sit there going ‘well that invalidates everything we just did’ you go back. You fix the problem and re-do the experiment to see how it impacted your results. Where is this bad science? This is what you do when you discover another element that had been previously unknown."

I'll look at Project Alpha more closely. Not much else to say here.

"Then SAY that. What you actually said, reguardless of what you meant, what you actually SAID was until psionics was complete categorically proven it would never be science. You also implied all the main stream sciences WERE utterly prove, when they’re not. They’re just categorized areas of study. You’ve been arguing semantics and making sweeping generalizations since you came here. Don’t try and gripe at me when I call you on it."

*Sigh* This is probably where I got off on the wrong foot. I used the mainstream sciences as an example because they have high standards for proof like I do. I did not mean to imply they are the end-all classification of what science is.

"Yet, you never MENTION that. You just go on about how crazy it all sounds and how impossible it all seems. You don’t give any lines of evidence other than ‘that sounds absurd.’ When you repeat in every other post that ‘passing thought’ that we’re crazy what do you expect us to believe? When most of your posts either deliberately or accidentally call us frauds, hoaxes, and phonies why are you surprised when we’re trying to correct you?"

Because I didn't think I was offending anyone at the time.

"Then give it. Live up to what you’re demanding of us, and you have several times stated you want perfect proof of psionics. If you can’t give us perfect proof of your observations then do not even imply you want perfect proof of psionics. Hold yourself to the same standard you hold us to, or don’t bother."

The PsiPog forum archive is down at the moment, so I can't provide the evidence just yet. But I don't know WHERE you got the idea that I have a standard of perfect proof. The only standards I can see that I've used are the mainstream scientific community's standards and my own, which are fairly high but certainly not on the order of "perfect".

"Where did you rescind it? You just kept on comparing us to everyone else under the sun without once mentioning anything WE had done here, on this site, in our articles. You just keep babbling on about everyone BUT us, and very heavily implying that this was how you viewed ANYONE who practiced psionics. You keep bringing up everything everyone else is doing wrong and applying it to us. You don’t bot"

I didn't feel I had to formally announce that I took it back, but since you and others called me out on it, I did. Are you looking for an apology or what? I can do that, if it insulted anyone that badly.

That being said, STOP HOUNDING ME FOR MY FALSE CORRELLATION BETWEEN YOU AND OTHERS. Change that to past tense and be done with it!

"No, that was only a small part of my case. Your apparent faulty understanding of what science actually is and how it actually works was a major topic throughout. Your insistence on arguments that are not evidence was another. And then I concluded with your refusal to discuss THIS site and it’s own merits rather than superimposing everyone else’s mistakes on us. Half the things you said you were saying here, never once were actually said, and usually you were implying the exact opposite of what you now claim was your intent."

You are not a very good judge of intent. I was just casually posting my thoughts on the matter, not intentionally branding you as loonies. I didn't really think about whether or not it would offend people. Seriously, if I wanted to insult people, I could have said a whole lot more.

I don't think the problem is that half the things I said I said were never said, I think it's that half the things YOU said I said were never said. I searched my posts on this thread and couldn't find one place where I requested PERFECT proof. Proof, yes, but not perfect proof. I said some stubborn people may not accept gravity without perfect proof (which is impossible), and that perfect proof of the brain's inner workings may never be obtained, leading to the inability to disprove psionics (ambiguous, but I meant beyond a reasonable doubt). You're the one who came up with the notion that I wanted perfect proof of psionics, and you've been putting words in my mouth about it this whole time.

"And yes, I have. As I’ve mentioned repeatedly I’m re-designing the experiment. When I get the code up you’re welcome to take a look at it. MY belief is based on things external to that particular faulty piece of equipment. I still haven’t gotten the Java code on the hexatron to actually decompile as anything other than gibberish. Reading code through wingding is not exactly an easy task. See my point on what you do when you find out something may be a problem. My previous experiment in the field was with a regular playing deck of cards. There my accuracy was about 65-70% on guessing color. The posted results were lost with the intermediate site for psionline and I’ve not located the note book I kept the original data in. Though I did freak out the class I was in at the time.

The Hexatron was simply a convenient tool. It turned out to be too suspect to use, so we’re re-doing the experiment. This is what happens in ANY science when you find out you have contaminated results. You do the experiment again. You haven’t addressed anything else on site. You just gloat over the one thing and seem to think that kills EVERYTHING. You have obviously never actually done research. You’ve never tried to account for all the variables yourself. You’ve never had to deal with the situation where someone else used the lab and jostled your equipment so now all your readings are 30 microns off which completely changes how the data are going to correlate. If you’re basing everything on that one case, you really need to review your scientific method, and take a good hard look at why you’re actually here. Are you here to go, as you did on that post, “HA! I win!” or are you here to actually learn something?"

Do you know WHY I had to throw that one piece of evidence in your face? It's because YOU accused me of having NOTHING to back myself up. And then you say I'm basing EVERYTHING on it? I provided it to defeat your claim that I hadn't done anything, not to base all my scientific study on it. And I have to say, it's awfully hard to try and learn something when you're having to spend your time defending yourself in an argument mostly about inadvertent insults instead of playing around with psi.

"If the later, please and kindly actually start looking at EVERYTHING we do. Not just the ones you think will get you an ‘easy win’. I don’t feel like playing that kind of a game. It’s getting very old."

It's just that I can't really make my own worthwhile observations until I get psi working well enough. The Hexatron, I could look into that since I know a bit about computers, but anything else, all I can get out of it is "it's not working for me". And I can't really judge the quality of other peoples', since I'm inexperienced. How should I know if somebody's made a force shield or moved a pencil or sent thoughts to someone else when I haven't done it myself?

I've been practicing, but it's just taking way too long.


(*sigh* I haven't gotten into an argument of this magnitude since......ever.)

[The Devil's Advocate]

Yes they are. Just because you don't see them for a day or two doesn't mean they're not there. I ran my response to you by one prior to posting. I usually do for posts of that magnitude.

I am taking this to Debate and Discussion. I will respond point by point, though I don't think it will do any good. We have QUOTED you repeatedly, and you just go 'that's not what I meant!" Well then say what you mean.

~The Devil's advocate

[wolfdancer]

Yes, we're around. I'm obviously here and I've seen evidence of a few other mods poking their heads in on the board this last week as well.
I moved this topic here since it has become more debate and discussion and appropriate to this section. I will respond more to this and other posts tonight. It will be the first time in a week I'll have an hour or so to sit down at a computer and write an intelligent response. I have not posted because I did not want to make generalizations that wouldn't further the discussion.

BTW Please calm down a bit. I will review the messages again this evening, but the conclusions DA was coming up with based on your statements matched my own impressions rather closely. Maybe I was reading too fast, but I haven't had a lot of time to analyze every word of every post this week.

~Wolfd@ncer~

[innerfire]

Just to interject, can you two *please* use the little quote tags when quoting each other? I'm finding these conversations hard to follow without them

[wolfdancer]

OK. *wipes sweat from brow* I have just finished re-reading this thread. Not something I want to do regularly.
I would like to point out that you can currently get up to a doctorate degree in Parapsychology. It is currently discussed in 'mainstream' sciences. It has a published Journal, degrees, and discussion. What more is needed to classify something as a Science?
A lot of the words you have used (such as rescinded) have a depth of meaning that you seem to be missing. Rescinded, for example, is not just a change of mind, but a verbal statement saying that the former was being taken back. Also, there is a professional definition of 'perfect proof' however I don't believe that is how you are using the term in that manner so I will not go into further discussion on it. Just wanted to make you aware of the fact.
It would be nice if both of you would use quote and /quote enclosed in [ ]. Thanks.
I think everything else has been pretty well addressed by DA and Jaci and a few others.

~Wolfd@ncer~ (who should have been in bed over an hour ago).